European and Middle Eastern medieval mythology is populated not only by such famous examples of fabulous beasts as the dragon, griffin, basilisk, centaur, unicorn, and minotaur, but also by many lesser-known yet no less fascinating fauna, including a small furry mystery beast called the mimick dog. The reason for its name is that the mimick […]

Dr Georg Wilhelm Steller was a German physician and naturalist participating during the early 1740s in the last of Danish explorer Vitus Bering’s Russian expeditions to the Arctic waters (now called the Bering Sea) separating Siberia’s Kamchatka Peninsula from Alaska. During this expedition, Steller documented many new species of animal, including four very contentious forms that continue to arouse cryptozoological curiosity even today.

In spring 1987, amid the far northeastern Kamchatka peninsula region of what was then the Soviet Union but is now Russia, hunter Rodion Sivolobov obtained the skin of a giant white bear. To most eyes, it might simply look like the pelt of an over-sized polar bear, but according to Sivolobov, and the area’s local […]

…the publication of The Menagerie of Marvels, whose subtitle, A Third Compendium of Extraordinary Animals, reveals that it is volume #3 in my series dealing with extraordinary animals from both cryptozoology and mainstream zoology.

With an area of more than 340,000 square miles, New Guinea is second only to Greenland as the largest island in the world (Australia is bigger than both but is officially deemed an island continent, rather than a mere island). Throughout its length and breadth, however, are dense and often little-explored rainforests where various surprising […]

A very considerable number of unicorn varieties have been differentiated in legends and folklore from around the world – everything from shape-shifting were-unicorns, carnivorous rabbit unicorns, polar bear unicorns with glowing horns, web-footed unicorns, swivel-horned unicorns, and man-eating unicorns with musical horns, to unicorn birds, unicorn snakes, unicorn snails, unicorn pigs, artificially-induced unicorns, and even two-horned unicorns (surely a contradiction in terms!).

Despite several decades of research, mystery still surrounds the species identity of so-called anomalous primates such as the yeti in the Himalaya, almasty in central Asia and sasquatch/bigfoot in North America. On the one hand, numerous reports including eye-witness and footprint evidence, point to the existence of large unidentified primates in many regions of the world. On the other hand, no bodies or recent fossils of such creatures have ever been authenticated. There is no shortage of theories about what these animals may be, ranging from surviving populations of collateral hominids such as Homo neanderthalensis, Homo floresiensis or Denisovans, extinct apes such as Gigantopithecus or even unlikely hybrids between Homo sapiens and other mammals.

It was back in July 1997 when a curious snippet that apparently featured a while earlier on the internet (possibly in the Virtual Bigfoot Conference website) was brought to my attention by English palaeontologist Dr Darren Naish. However, its mysterious claim is still unverified today, so I’m posting it here on Cryptomundo in the hope that […]